Mumbai: Microsoft AI has appointed Umesh Shankar as corporate vice president of engineering, where he will spearhead initiatives in AI innovation, security and privacy.Shankar brings nearly two decades of experience from Google, where he served as chief technologist for Google Cloud Security and engineering director for Google Assistant Ecosystem. His work focused on strengthening AI security frameworks and advancing data protection to enhance user trust and safety.
At Microsoft, he will direct efforts to develop responsible AI, ensuring secure and ethical AI integration across products and services. His appointment underscores Microsoft’s commitment to advancing AI with robust privacy and security standards, reinforcing its global AI-driven strategy.
His work focused on making GCP the safest environment for AI development and leveraging AI to tackle critical security challenges, such as cloud posture management, threat intelligence, fraud prevention, and secops. Prior to this, he was engineering director for Google Assistant’s Ecosystem, handle a team of 180 engineers across global locations to develop AI-driven services like duplex on the web, actions on Google, identity and transactions APIs. His earlier tenure at Google also included pioneering efforts in data protection, key management, authentication, authorization, auditing, and insider risk controls, building security infrastructure used across Google's products and services. Notably, he led the access transparency project, providing Google Cloud customers with real-time logs of data access events, unlocking nearly 900 million dollars in revenue. Before joining Google, he held roles as an advisor at LiquidTalent, a research intern at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and a software engineer at Idiom Technologies.
Shankar holds a PhD and M.S. in Computer Science with a focus on security and privacy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Computer Science from Harvard University. His extensive expertise in AI security and privacy positions him to play a crucial role in shaping Microsoft AI’s responsible AI initiatives and strengthening its global AI-driven strategy.
